Intelligent Design

The bartender says, “We don’t serve neutrinos here” A neutrino walks into a bar. The blogosphere is all abuzz about the CERN neutrino experiment that reported “faster than light” travel for the neutrinos. We all heard the news first from the blogs, and now the arXive pre-print server has the details. This immediate publication is already truly amazing, given the months before the paper copy appears in the library journal. The comments and consequences are flying so thick and fast, one hardly has time to absorb the impact. Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity some 107 years ago, and this has been the first, contradictory laboratory evidence for “superluminal” transport. But already, one day later, the first theorist has chimed Read More ›

I’ll just let the scientists speak for themselves. “In the last two decades there have been dramatic changes in our understanding of how evolution works,” said Gunter Wagner, the Alison Richard Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) and senior author of the paper. “We used to believe that changes only took place through small mutations in our DNA that accumulated over time. But in this case we found a huge cut-and-paste operation that altered wide areas of the genome to create large-scale morphological change.” Liz Liddle certainly continues to believe in “cummulative selection”, but some scientists have a differing view. Indeed, “These transposons are not genes that underwent small changes over long periods of time and eventually grew into Read More ›

Space: rocks floating around in the dark. Who cares? Canadian blogger Five Feet of Fury offers her blunt opinion, which may be more widespread than many science nerds suppose: After the novelty wore off, NASA spent decades getting borderline bitchy about how nobody else cared about their launches and missions anymore. But they had turned into Marge Simpson in that one where she keeps wearing the Chanel suit to everything. When nobody else is looking, nobody over the age of 12 gives much of a crap about real life space travel. They care more about imaginary space travel; who gets asked for his autograph more often: the second man on the moon (whoever that was) or Leonard Nimoy? Proof that Read More ›

From “Twin Study Reveals Epigenetic Alterations of Psychiatric Disorders” (ScienceDaily, Sep. 23, 2011), we learn: Previous quantitative genetic analyses of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder reveal strong inherited components to both. However, although heritability for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder is estimated at 70%, disease concordance between twin-pairs is far from 100%, indicating that non-genetic factors play an important role in the onset of the diseases. Essentially, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are thought to have a strong genetic component, which focuses researchers’ attention on the many cases where one twin has such a disorder and the other does not. The current study looked at 22 such pairs of twins. “Epigenetic mechanisms are linked to heritable, but reversible, changes in gene expression without Read More ›

Here, we’ve given a fair amount of space to Texas textbook hearings, and it’s only fair to say why. Godfather Politics recalls (September 21, 2011) Texas distributes 48 million textbooks every year. This is a huge market if you are a textbook publisher. While California is the nation’s largest textbook market, the state’s financial crisis has not made it a major player. New York and Illinois are also big markets. Any new textbooks are going to be tailored to fit with what the textbook adoption agencies decide in to do in Texas since Texas has money to purchase new textbooks. “The state’s $22 billion education fund is among the largest educational endowments in the country.” Long before these current battles, Read More ›

Everyone has a religion, a raison d’être, and mine was once Dawkins’. I had the same disdain for people of faith that he does, only I could have put him to shame with the power and passion of my argumentation. But something happened. As a result of my equally passionate love of science, logic, and reason, I realized that I had been conned. The creation story of my atheistic, materialistic religion suddenly made no sense. This sent a shock wave through both my mind and my soul. Could it be that I’m not just the result of random errors filtered by natural selection? Am I just the product of the mindless, materialistic processes that “only legitimate scientists” all agree produced Read More ›

Last week in Glasgow, Scotland, Centre for Intelligent Design (C4ID) director Alastair Noble, David Swift, and I attended a lecture presented by Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education. The event was organized by Glasgow Skeptics, who previously hosted a talk by PZ Myers back in June. Click here to continue reading>>>

My company has been very generous in providing me with all kinds of training in highly sophisticated computational technologies. I’ve attended numerous training seminars, primarily in the areas of finite element analysis and computational fluid dynamics. These three- to five-day courses are universally incredibly intensive, and it is assumed that the attendee has a thorough background in mathematics (integral and differential calculus, and differential equations), a complete understanding of basic physics (e.g., F=ma, so that the mathematical engine of the FEA or CFD solver can process the input), and experience with command-line Unix or Linux operating systems. In my experience attending these training courses I am struck by the fact that I am almost always among the very few who Read More ›